1-15 April: Sister Spit 2015 tour of west coast USA + Vancouver

As I flagged on this blog last August, I’m returning to North America soon for a tour. This 2 week tour will span some cities in west coast USA, as well as Vancouver.

By March of last year, I already had plans to return to Australia in December. However, I’d reserved the possibility of returning to North America if a fantastic artistic opportunity eventuated. Then in July, San Francisco author and curator Michelle Tea asked me if I would join the Sister Spit: Next Generation tour.

There was my fantastic artistic opportunity.

Sister Spit is a queer multimedia literary performance tour that travels the United States and Canada. Along with original co-founders Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson, performers have included Eileen Myles, Lynn Breedlove, Amos Mac, Justin Vivian Bond, TextaQueen (the only other Australian artist who has joined the tour, to my knowledge) and many others. (City Lights Books gives more info about Sister Spit here.)

The 2015 tour begins on March 31 at Hammer Museum, LA (Facebook event link). I’m not on the bill for this first performance but will be cheering on my fellow touring artists from the audience. The next day, I’ll then join the tour:

Line-ups will vary slightly between gigs, with special guests being featured (e.g. Francesca Lia Block, Nikki Darling and Zackary Drucker in LA), so please check the details in the individual Facebook events. Among the performers are:

Thomas Page McBee (author of Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man)

Myriam Gurba (author of various publications include Dahlia Season, which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction)

Here’s a video sampler of some of the artists from Sister Spit’s April 2012 tour:

Now that the tour itinerary is public, it’s all starting to feel a bit more real now. I’m looking forward to hearing the work of my fellow touring artists, learning more about touring in the US and Canada, meeting excellent queers, seeing more of the US and, of course, taking the Arsenal Pulp Press edition of Look Who’s Morphing to new audiences.